French court fines Uber, execs for illegal taxi service | Hacker News Reader

French court fines Uber, execs for illegal taxi service

reuters.com

66 pointsflexie82 comments

Execs, Managers, etc. should be sent to jail when they break the law deliberately. Fines are not enough as if the benefit of breaking the law is higher than the fine, then there is no incentive to stop.

We've seen that happening with all the big corp cartels that just provision money from those benefits to pay the eventual fine.

The fact that the French Law here may be bad or wrong is not relevant to this point.

Fines are okay, just make them larger.

Jail for managers should be reserved for situations where people have serious damages. It would be appropriate for certain bank malfeasance, but not for violating taxi regulations.

Maybe a token amount for non-serious damages, like a month. Shame should be effective here.

This is a little past simple violation of a regulation. This is acting like your above the law which is generally dealt with much more harshly.

Everyone driving 15mph above the speed limit is "acting like they are above the law".

Driving 15mph above the speed limit and then ignoring the cop pulling you over is acting like you are above the law and will not end well.

If a court would be able to number the amount of money a corporation did make with an illegal practice it would be able give a fine which is higher then the gains, else the fine wouldn't have any effect. But with the now common creative bookkeeping/tax evasion schemes this is not possible anymore. So Jail is the only solution if you want to be sure that those managers don't just get a compensation from their corporation.

I doubt the benefit is actually higher than the fine. My guess is that Uber is hoping for a long term gain from a reversal of the law, but it's a gamble that might not pay off.

Frankly, I have no problem with this. As long as there's no direct harm to people (so no fake drugs or contaminated food, etc) and it's done openly, I think it's fine for companies to make this gamble. Either society recognizes the law as outdated and abolishes it (a win-win) or it sticks by the law and the government gets to pay for some public expenses by bleeding some VCs. Either way, society wins.

> The court said in its ruling that UberPOP had caused a "durable disruption" of the transport sector, provoking violent protests by taxi drivers that had disturbed public order.

Fine Uber because taxi drivers are violent? makes sense.

No, they were fined because they decided to enter a tightly regulated market without gaining the necessary permits and permission, and following the requisite rules.

Not saying it's right that the industry is regulated, and it's certainly not right that the French Taxi drivers resorted to violence, but if you want to operate in a country, you have to abide by their rules, it's called the cost of doing business.

Now, there's nothing to stop them lobbying for change of course.

fined because they tried to play in a bought and paid for market when there was nothing for sale. Industries went from being regulated to being protected. I don't know the numbers in France but Occupational Licensing in the United States stymies competition and worse puts a disproportionate burden on the poor when trying to enter such a licensed field. You can actually spend more money and time gaining a license to cut hair than be an EMT in some states.

There can be no justice when laws are not just.

Well the court just decided that the law was just.

Unless US tech companies with billions of funding are above it, they still have to respect it.

Uber is still allowed in France, only UberPop is forbidden like in a lot of european countries and rightly so.

More broadly, they were fined because of the European and especially French culture of the left wing where a business generally owns their customers and an employee owns his job. How dare you liberate these consumers by offering them a choice? They are OURS. Doubly so because Uber is so terribly un-French. We will have our friends in the government protect ourselves from this theft.

Mind you, it's not as bad as, say, the teachers in Mexico who can sell their job to someone else, but... it has an impact on the economy, and it's a major reason youth unemployment is so high (and a contributing factor to why immigrant communities can't integrate, which is a contributing factor to the security situation over there...)

No they were fined because they broke the rules. If they don't agree with the rules they need to get them changed first. They just pretended they didn't exists in hope that they rules was going to be changed

I actually think Uber made a smart move, from its point of view. You can't expect people to support your cause until you've given them a glimpse of what life could be like with your service. If the punishment for breaking the law is a slap on the wrist, that's nothing compared to getting access to the potential market earlier:

> The app connects 12,000 professional drivers with 1.5 million clients.

You're all discussing it as if this is something new.

Ignoring the law in hope of capturing the market before they get banned is the very modus operandi of Uber. They do this all the time, everywhere.

Well then, I guess it's been working out for them ;)

So far..

How would you react if someone destroys your means of living with very questionable methods? (subsidized fares, no calibrated taximeter, unprofessional possibly criminal drivers, ...)

I would suggest the fact that taxi drivers are so violent actually means that they make their living with very questionable methods.

It is understandable that execs are fined or even jailed for breaking business licensing regulations. It is not understandable that people do actual, real violence and that is shrugged off because it's political.

I would posit that taxi drivers resorting to violence suggests that there may be some violent (possibly criminal) people driving taxis.

Personal anecdote, of course, but Uber saved my ass while I was in Europe (specifically Paris and Madrid).

Immediately upon arriving via train to Paris from London we were harassed by a number of sketchy looking individuals claiming to be "taxi" drivers, of course not speaking French I really had no way to validate the claims, they all became hostile towards me the minute I took my camera out.

I resorted to opening the Uber app and lo and behold had a validated ride within minutes. The service was exceptional and they even spoke English relatively well.

Fast forward 24 hours, I thought I had booked a flight out of the airport in the city about 20 mins drive, turns out my flight was actually out of the airport much further north of Paris.

I rushed to get an Uber and my driver was extremely friendly and not only brought me to the exact bus station I needed to be at, also showed me exactly which ticket to purchase and where to wait.

Never in my life have I received close to that level of service from a taxi driver.

A couple weeks later in Madrid we found ourselves pretty far away from our flat, not well equipped for the weather and ready to head back. We saw several advertisements for the local taxi services "ride sharing" app and decided to give it a shot. After jumping between a couple starbucks to find reasonable wifi, we ordered a taxi and proceeded to wait 20+ minutes for a driver to finally show up in the app as our pickup, however, the actual taxi was nowhere to be found. No text / call / messages in the app ever succeeded. Once again we resorted to Uber and had a painless experience.

I guess my point overall is that Uber offers a familiar service no matter what country I happen to be in. It's simply not viable for a foreigner to arrive in a new country, find out what ride sharing taxi service is allowed existence there, download the app, finagle my way through the most-likely non english friendly sign-up process and enter my personal banking details only to find out the service doesn't even work for whatever reason.

Don't get me wrong, I love traveling to new places and truly exploring a city without all the luxuries and convenience of home, but when I arrive in a new place with expensive items in tow, I'd MUCH rather pay for the convenience of a safe and familiar ride to get to my destination then risk getting scammed or taken advantage of otherwise, I also don't always arrive with local currency in tow and don't like paying exorbitant fees at major transport hubs.

Does this means that you are ok with breaking the law if some ones offers you something convenient? Don't you care about workers rights? Should that rights be removed so you can have cheaper services?

I think that Uber app can bring awesome things. But is still operates in the real world and should not break the law. And it also should respect workers rights. One think should not exclude the other.

French law doesn't forbids Uber to operate. It just asks it to have the correct licenses like any one else.

Except that the taxi licenses are limited to a fixed quota that is much too low for a city like Paris. Taxi drivers must rent their license from a taxi company or buy it from former drivers for large sums of money and they will go on strike as soon as a government says that they want to loosen the system a bit, which would lower the value of their investment. Uber such a success because the taxi service is so inadequate.

> French law doesn't forbids Uber to operate. It just asks it to have the correct licenses like any one else.

You are being downvoted but that's a very good point, France isn't the wild west. Is Uber useful ? no doubt they are, but so are any other illegal taxi service. The french justice system just said Uber POP is illegal in France. other Uber services are just fine. Uber hasn't been outlawed in France.

> Is Uber useful ? no doubt they are, but so are any other illegal taxi service.

It is my understanding that Uber only has a problem with a single service of the many they provide: the rideshare one, where unlicensed and unregistered people get to provide the service for a fee.

This is not the only service provided by uber. Uber also offers transportation services provided by fully licensed and perfectly legal transport operators.

I care about worker's rights, but of all workers, not just of the privileged few who get the luck of the lottery while the others remain unemployed.

The system in France appears not to be that of lottery but of investing into taxi licenses´, the number of which the government keeps artificially low due to violent industrial action by licensed taxi entrepreneurs. It's more rent-seeking than lottery.

>Don't you care about workers rights?

As far as I can tell the only worker right you are talking about here is the right to not lose your job, and that's not a right that the law usually protects. You can be deeply concerned about worker rights and at the same time defend Uber. And in fact, in my opinion, Uber is much better for worker rights than taxis, prove of that is that there are many more women driving Ubers than taxis.

> Does this means that you are ok with breaking the law if some ones offers you something convenient?

The goal of business regulation is to protect the clients. If a regulation does nothing to protect the clients and only hinders their rights, that regulation is absurd and should be rethought.

> Don't you care about workers rights?

Imposing artificial restrictions on a market is not workers rights. It's corporativism, typical of totalitarian states, which abuses the rights of all citizens of a nation only to guarantee absurd priviledges to a minority.

>Does this means that you are ok with breaking the law if some ones offers you something convenient?

I doubt he's breaking the law by using Uber.

That's a rather low standard for 'saving your ass'. I travel abroad frequently and I don't recall ever having had trouble to find a taxi except for Colombia, where you have to arrange one in advance (or rather, had, no idea how it is today there).

Really, of all the hard things one could attempt to do while abroad getting a taxi isn't one of them.

Some simple rules:

- don't accept anybody's offer of a ride

- look for relatively uniformly colored vehicles in a row

- observe whether or not the drivers are asleep or awake

- approach the first one that looks awake

- ask if they are free

- if so enter the vehicle and state destination

- optional: if all you have is a credit card make sure you ask up front if it will be accepted, otherwise ask to stop at a local ATM to pick up some currency

Using taxis was a solved problem long before Uber and the like arrived. Just like there is more food than McDonalds that is perfectly safe to eat when abroad.

Your advice is laughably bad in many parts of the world. Taxi scams, often perpetrated by those uniformly-colored vehicles lined up to take riders, bilk tourists/travelers out of a ton of money. The simple fact that there's often no way to ensure what the price of the ride will be before agreeing to accept the ride has left many a traveler being faced with the choice of paying and exorbitant amount or risking a run-in with the authorities for not paying. Worse yet, taxi drivers will hold bags in the trunk hostage as they demand payment. Even in the US, scams are common. Taxi drivers let air out of their tires to increase the milage or ask whether they can use the freeway knowing it will take you miles out of your way.

And these are legitimate taxi drivers. From everything that I've observed taking both legitimate taxis and Ubers around the world, Uber's policies keep drivers far more well behaved than do the policies of the official taxi agencies. And the poster you were replying to is right...the consumer experience is considerably better. The simplified payment and upfront pricing alone make Uber better for riders.

I've done my share of traveling and I've yet to be scammed by a taxi driver, maybe that's just luck but the number of days I spent abroad is probably higher by now than the number of days I spent in my home country.

I'm far more ware of the police abroad than of taxi drivers.

You're either lucky or for some reason taxi drivers think I'm an easy target to scam.

First, my definition of scamming by a taxi driver: When a taxi driver takes a much longer route so that he can charge more.

Countries where I've been scammed:

1. France (Paris but not in smaller cities). Even though I'm French, I've had multiple Parisian drivers scam me.

2. Thailand. Over there it's even more blatant with multiple taxi drivers refusing to use the counter when they see a foreigner.

3. Malaysia. Same as Thailand

4. Portugal. A lot of taxi drivers there usually do not have GPS, have an approximate understanding of the streets and will take a very long way to get to your destination (80% of the taxi drivers in my experience). Still not sure if it's incompetence or malice but Uber drivers were almost always quicker and more accurate.

Countries where taxis were reliable:

1. Japan. I've always had great experiences there

2. China. I've taken a lot of taxies in Shanghai and while there's been a few times when a driver tried to scam me, percentage wise it's negligible and much lower than say France.

3. UK. I haven't taken a lot of cabs there but the ones I took were all professionals and accurate.

So now the question is, are you lucky? Do you maybe not notice when you're taken for a ride? Or do taxi drivers assume from my demeanor that I'm an easy target...

I've never taken uberPop in France because it was illegal. On the other hand, uberx is legal and consistently offers a much better service than taxies in France.

Regarding police, I'm always wary of policemen especially if they're armed and in countries with little protection against abuse like Japan.

Where do you travel?

I've been taxi scammed in:

- Italy(Napoli): Get taxi from train station to hostel. Drive around for 40 minutes, end up under 1 mile from train station.

- Morocco(Tangier): Get taxi from port to bus station, same thing as in Italy

- France(Bordeaux): Get taxi from hotel to airport. Taxi driver demands extra 20 euro for carrying my backpack in the trunk.

- Costa Rica (San Jose): Get taxi from airport to hotel. Taxi drops me off at hotel, and I pay. I realize that it is no where near the right hotel, wave taxi down, and he refuses to take me to the correct hotel or refund my money.

I've had people try to scam me in Italy but that never worked, drivers demanding extra money for putting your luggage in the trunk should be dealt with appropriately (though that one never happened to me, it would seem that 20 euros is a bit excessive), Costa Rica and Morocco I have no experience with (though I'd expect Costa Rica to be more or less like Panama and I didn't have any issues there on multiple visits).

I think a good part of this is that I don't come across as your average 'easy to rip off' tourist so that may very well be why so far taxi drivers have been pretty good to me.

I've had attempted scams at the Rome central train station at least three times. "Meter is broken."

I've yet to have a problem with a taxi. Agree on a price ballpark before getting in. They won't have any incentive taking the long route, and when arrived you don't have to budge if they ask for more.

Granted that I look like a very cheap backpacker, which might help getting a correct price in the first place.

I guess you haven't taken many taxis in foreign/non-first-world countries? You can haggle all you want, but if the man is holding your luggage hostage, you'll have to pay or get the authorities involved...which may be difficult if you don't speak the local language. And the fact that all the driver has to say is "We never agreed to that price beforehand"

> I guess you haven't taken many taxis in foreign/non-first-world countries?

That would be a wrong guess.

And you'd have a hard time holding my luggage hostage, I have a single small bag that goes with me in the passenger compartment. Large suitcases are a vulnerability.

A cab driver tried to hold me up at gunpoint in Panama City (I jumped out of the moving cab, much to my captor's surprise). My sister-in-law had a similar experience in Mexico City (sans the dramatic escape). And I'm probably much more savvy than the average tourist. This happens all too commonly.

I wrote it up, if anyone prefers the long form: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-have-a-loade...

Wow, that's a new one. I've been to Panama City many times and never had that happen to me, on the other hand, a friend of mine was in a car with a friend of his and said friend got shot through the head at a traffic light. It's not the safest place on the planet, to put it very mildly.

> I guess my point overall is that Uber offers a familiar service no matter what country I happen to be in.

This is exactly why I use it as well. I see advertisements for a local "taxi app", and ignore them because I have no expectation of consistency. I can expect that Uber will work the same way with the same level of quality everywhere.

Do you want a global monopoly? Because this is how you get a monopoly.

Expect a taxi market similar to the current US ISP market soon.

Taxi's are already a defacto monopoly regardless of how many taxi operators there are in a given region.

Most countries/cities have one taxi driver union/authority which is responsible for licensing drivers and cabs as well as usually setting fares.

If anything Uber and various direct bid/reverse bid car hire services actually break down the monopoly.

Now I don't like Uber for many reasons, the primary one being that it sets a horrible example of how to run a multi billion dollar business involving 100,000's of people around the world without having actual employees. I also don't like the fact that Uber in many places actually externalizes the risk to its drivers because while France might fine Uber if you as a driver are caught operating a car service without the proper license you'll be in hot water and I somehow doubt that Uber's onboarding process has a huge warning to drivers and for the most part Uber doesn't seem to do any due diligence or much of it in places where it's illegal for individuals to commercially drive others without a proper license and a criminal background check (I know in the UK Uber doesn't ask you for a commercial license or a DBS).

> Do you want a global monopoly? Because this is how you get a monopoly.

I want consistently good service, no matter who provides it. I'd love to see more than one company providing that level of service, but I place far less value on that than I do on consistently good service.

I plan to try Lyft as soon as they either get their Android app upgraded for Marshmallow-style selective permissions (which they still haven't done a year after Marshmallow) or they provide a web app.

As soon as uber has a monopoly, you think they’ll continue their good service?

Because what you’ll get as soon as 2 or 3 companies control the market will be like the ISPs in the US.

Uber and Lyft are going to be the next Comcast, the next TWC; the next ATT, the next Verizon.

Regulated taxis are already a state enforced monopoly.

Except, in many regions where Uber is expanding to the government does not enforce a monopoly.

It’d cost me about 50€ to get a commercial drivers license, and I could start my own taxi company that very same day. Commercial drivers license, Commercial insurance, no further regulation.

But Uber is trying to expand into this region.

My service is going to get worse.

I'm in a taxi at the moment driving home from Orly. There are lots of those 'chauffeurs' out there like there are at many airports in the states. I walked by them to the taxi stand about 15 feet from the airport exit and am now in a taxi as comfortable as any uber I've been in in NYC.

Two weeks ago I returned to Paris from Amsterdam by train at Gare du Nord (a major train station in Paris) and the experience was almost identical to the one I am currently experiencing.

In short, there is no need for uber to save your ass in the circumstances you describe since your ass doesn't need saving in the circumstances you describe.

Search for "stockholm taxi scam" for a great example of why your ass might indeed need saving

True, that's quite scummy, but surely it's an example of under-regulation, not over-regulation. This scam (not sure that's the right word since what they're doing is perfectly legal albeit morally reprehensible) literally cannot happen in places where taxi fares are fixed.

In my opinion, I'd rather not have to research the taxi legistlation of countries I visit. Uber provides a globally uniform service at an uniform price, and like it or not, taxis do not.

That's fair, I guess. It seems like a relatively minor point in the grand scheme of cultural differences you will have to deal with whenever you travel somewhere else and I find it hard to relate to the desire for standardisation and uniformity that I notice mostly from people in the tech community, but I'm not going to pretend that variations in taxi legislation are a charming cultural quirk worth preserving, so nothing makes my opinion more valid than yours.

In those places they just take a longer route instead.

Until there's a taxi strike or you get overcharged or you order a prepaid taxi and they never show up. I live in France and taxi drivers as a group are not even in the same league as Uber drivers. I speak French and know my city extremely well and they'll try to take some ridiculous routing until I call them out on it. In Paris especially, I would only hire private car services or Uber, never a taxi. I don't have to beat my head against a wall more than a few times before I realize that taxis are a pain point that needed solving.

This was a criminal prosecution, so the execs will end up with a criminal record if they don't win their appeal though they won't go to jail. No need to say that with a criminal conviction in France, unless you have friends in high places, your management career is over.

They didn't design these disruptive policies, they obeyed the higher up exec in San Fransisco. Is it really worth risking a criminal record that won't go away for Uber ? I don't know... I hope Uber will reward them for their "loyalty" .

I don't see why their management career would be over. Especially if they are looking at management opportunities at US companies operating in France.

This is an industry I know well and certainly some of the FR country managers of US tech companies have shady pasts. In a sales-driven organisation this is usually seen positively as some sort of war wound (ie: this is a man ready to do what's necessary).

Lol, are joking?

All the managers would have to do is explain the situation of why they have a "criminal record".

These aren't low level cogs at the company. No employer who is looking to hire one of these people would bat an eye at the "criminal record".

completely agree. I don't know why you are being downvoted

Just because you follow orders from higher up doesn't mean that you are exempt from the law or don't need to do your own moral judgements.

"...two managers....guilty of deceptive commercial practices and being accomplices in operating an illegal transportation service and violating privacy laws..."

Is this something that shows up in your personal criminal record? Or hurts the managers personally any other way?

Reason I am asking is because usually there is a clear legal separation between the legal-entity (company) and the people working for it. For example the legal-entity might go bankrupt but the people running it do not.

There's a liability separation, which is different.

Failing to make a profit is not against the law. If you do things that are against the law while working for a company, that doesn't give you any protection.

You could not, for example, set up an assassination corporation and expect that the company would take the blame.

I'm sure being head of country for a company that will likely IPO above $100 billion will be fine for their careers.

Why does people think that software is beyond the law?

The secret services think that reading electronic communications is ok when the physical counterpart was not.

A company thinks that because they offer their services using and app they are beyond regulations, permits and other laws.

No, laws still should apply in the virtual world. And apps and the Internet have real world consequences. It's a shame that judges often are so slow to apply the law in this cases. And that so often they miss the point.

Now Uber should just do what any bricks and mortar business needs to do and get a license, operate inside the boundaries of the law and compete with taxis in a fair way to bring people good services.

The law is not immutable. It's an evolving code of moral/social expectations and norms that changes as societies change.

At the end of the day, this was a business decision. Uber weighed the potential costs ($1m in fines, no jail time, minor brand damage to an already-sleazy brand) against the potential gain ($10's of m in revenue, foothold in new market, disruption of competitors) and decided to break the law.

If "society" did not want Uber to break the law, it would need to raise the associated costs. Almost everyone besides taxi driver unions/medallion-holders is apathetic to Uber's transgressions. Thus the taxi unions are weakened and the law changes to reflect changing social sentiment.

> compete with taxis in a fair way to bring people good services

I'd argue that taxi companies being so deeply entrenched into the government is unfair for any startup in the space. The boundaries of the law are rigged in the taxi company's favor.

The peer-2-peer mechanism is well understood now. Its economics have clearly been declared perfectly viable.

Therefore, you could have hundreds of Uber-style networks with a few cross-network search engines returning search results. That would have exactly the same effect as having just one Uber.

Transport services are important to the economy. We must always encourage swarmification of our critical infrastructure.

Furthermore, in a related case, we should be grateful that the powers that be attacked Napster and shut it down. Decentralization takes a lot of effort and is not just a natural outcome. The far-reaching decentralization of the bittorrent ecosystem only came about thanks to the continuous legal attacks that made it the only solution possible.

Therefore, I advocate sustained legal and other attacks on Uber.

We do not want a centralized system. We will need the attacks orchestrated by the state apparatus to properly shape a much more decentralized solution.

We should admire the selfless relentlessness of French government trying to protect us from ourselves.

It's not the French government, rather French law, and arguably French values. I've been living in France for the last 3 years and have come to deeply appreciate their tenaciousness when it comes to labour relations and worker rights.

As for the ruling, it's worth noting that the demand for material damage of the civil parties in the case, notably taxi driver unions, totalling some 114M€, have been rejected, while the court did accord the 5.2M€ in moral damage[0].

[0] http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/06/09/uberpop-80...

some worker's rights.

Indeed, the workers who already have safe jobs have protection and 36 hour work weeks while the 10.3% of the population who are unemployed are locked out.

The 35 (not 36) hour work week is mostly a myth. Most people work at least 39 hours a week (that is they do a minimum of 4h overtime), and a lot of them do additional overtime, also in the public sector and the large corporations.

The current government has been trying for months to pass labor reforms addressing overtime and employee dismissal. Those reforms are essential for lowering the unemployment rate, but are , as expected, met with very strong opposition from worker unions.

Thanks for correcting the misconception and adding context. I'm glad to see the situation isn't as simple as I posited it was.

And the alternative would be what? Like the US, everyone working 60h work weeks and still earning not more than unemployment benefits? (looking at Walmart, Uber, etc... yup)

"Everyone" is a giant stretch, there. Are you American? I promise that midtown-bound subway is not full of people going to work at McDonalds. The vast majority of people have white-collar, good benefit jobs. Probably more than the French when you count in the unemployed and the unwelcome in the banlieues.

> The vast majority of people have white-collar, good benefit jobs

You’re saying over 50% of americans have a white-collar job, with free healthcare, good benefits, etc?

The actual numbers look more like below 30% do.

43% of americans earn so little that they can’t even save up any money, or pay off their debts.

> everyone working 60h work weeks and still earning not more than unemployment benefits?

More like earning 3x vs. their colleagues in France. My team at Twitter was filled with French engineers who had to leave France to get paid a fair wage for their skillset.

You know that IT is a very unique industry and in US (especially in SV area) people get ridiculously high salaries?

Please compare normal jobs in normal industries. GP's point is a good one.

My point applies to any white-collar profession (although perhaps with a smaller multiplier).

In exchange for long hours and a crappy safety net, US professional workers get paid a lot more than their peers anywhere else in the world, keep more of it at tax time, and have low-cost goods and services to spend it on.

The average american has it a lot worse than the average French, though, after you count healthcare costs, insurance costs, etc.

Sure, the upper 25% live a lot better.

But is that relevant for the other 75%? No.

What is France's unemployment benefit amount per month?

Depending on circumstances, you get about 65% of your last salary for up to 3 years. There are lots of other benefits for the unemployed such as housing support, child support, and aid for starting a business.

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